‘US conducting clinical experiment for COVID-19 vaccine today’

The United States is experimenting with a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the COVID-19 on Monday, according to a report.

The trial is funded by the National Institutes of Health and will take place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.

It will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. But an official, on condition of anonymity, disclosed the plan for the first participant who is receiving an experimental dose today, according to Associated Press. The vaccine trial plans have not been publicly announced yet.

“Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There is no chance participants could get infected from the shots because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests, the Press reported.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals is also aiming to begin safety tests of its vaccine candidate next month in a few dozen volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania and a testing center in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a similar study in China and South Korea, the report states.

In China, scientists have been testing a combination of HIV drugs against the new coronavirus, as well as an experimental drug named remdesivir that was in development to fight Ebola.

In the US, the University of Nebraska Medical Center also began testing remdesivir in some Americans who were found to have COVID-19 after being evacuated from a cruise ship in Japan, according to the report.

The worldwide outbreak has infected 163,930 across 141 countries and claimed 6,420 lives.

According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three weeks to six weeks to recover.